SPEECH development AND MUSIC

THE NEW PEDAGOGY AN INTERDISCIPLINARY MODEL Integrate Literacy, Music and Technology into the Classroom.

LITERACY | SPEECH AND MUSIC -
Music is Language, Language is Music

Humans Cry, Whistle, Click, make music and speak to communicate.
We are pack animals. Evolutionary Science shows how our biology makes us Tune In , we need to be In Synch to swim and swarm with the school and the pack to survive. We like to be in with the crowd.

Babies Cry to Communicate

Studies from the 1960s paved the way for cry analysis today
Barry Lester, director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk, has been working with Sheinkopf and others on this project as an expert in baby cries. He notes that this kind of research dates back to the 1960s, with a disorder known as Cri du chat - cry of the cat - syndrome. Like Down syndrome, Cri du chat is a result of a genetic anomaly and is characterized by a recognizably high-pitched cry. Although the cries are perceivable by the human ear, Lester says the cries associated with that syndrome led him to wonder if there were other, smaller differences in a baby's cry that could be indicative of health.

He refers to a baby's cry as "a window into the brain."

Since the tests outlined in the team's paper show an accuracy rating of 88% to 95% for detecting voicing characteristics in the samples, the team is optimistic that their new device will be able to accurately identify problems in babies from a very early stage.

A team of Researchers from Brown University and the Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island have developed a device that analyzes a baby's cry as a means to interpret possible health or developmental problems. The Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research recently published a paper describing the device and its testing methods. The computer-based instrument may allow researchers and doctors to make use of cries as a way to determine whether a child has neurological or developmental problems.

According to a release from Brown University, the analyzer works in two steps:

• It separates recorded cries from babies into frames of 12.5 milliseconds. Each of these frames is then studied for things like frequency traits, voicing and volume.
• The frames then go back together, and this time they are categorized as either an utterance or a silence (the pause between each utterance). The utterances are then grouped according to their length and analyzed for variables such as pitch. In addition, the lengths of the silences are measured.
• In total, 80 different metrics are used to find clues about the health of a baby.

Stephen Sheinkopf, an assistant professor at Brown who helped develop the device, says:

"There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics. For instance, babies with birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in pregnancy, or birth of babies who are extremely premature can have ongoing medical effects.

Cry analysis can be a noninvasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies."

How do we learn to speak?
What is the connection between language and movement? Exploration of how striking parallels between bird and human brains are providing sharp new insights into how we acquire language and the links between hearing and movement.

Music is Language

Music and lyrics:
How the brain splits songs

Language and the brain
Your favourite song comes on the radio. You hum the tune; the lyrics remind you of someone you know. Is your brain processing the words and music separately or as one? It's a hotly debated question that may finally have an answer.

• Evolutionary Science and Culture
• Teach Reading using SONG
• Williams Syndrome, the brain and music
• Hungry sparrows sing the saddest songs
• Local scientist says how we speak influences the music we make
• Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds
• Wild Child never learns to speak
• Language comprehension research of 6 to 9 month olds infants can understand simple words even before making word-like sounds.
• Babies Are Born to Dance, New Research Shows
• If Bonobo Kanzi Can Point as Humans Do, What Other Similarities Can Rearing Reveal?
• Infants Do Not Appear to Learn Words from Educational DVDs
  

Interdisciplinary Social Rhythm Researchers

Sync and Swim =
Sync Sense

Social Rhythm Research Experts Find PDF
Rhythmic Synchrony governs conversation, and is part of life from infancy to old age. Tempos may vary from culture to culture and person to person but folks who successfully relate manage to stay in sync.
Rhythmic Researchers study the internal mechanisms which govern social rhythms and show that "sync sense" plays a major part in our ability to talk, work, and may also play a part in easing racial tensions.
People can improve the way they talk to people of other cultures just by investing a few hours in learning about cultural rhythms . Your body's locked precisely with your speech. You can't break out of this no matter what you do. Your eyes even blink in synchrony with your speech . Sensitivity to rhythm does not arrive when a child starts talking but may begin to develop in utero when the fetus senses heartbeat and hears the rhythm of the mother's speech, that may explain how we are hard wired for the language culture we are born to. Evolution may have etched the sync sense into the human system. Social Rhythm researchers say that music simply releases the rhythms that are already in us.

HEAR : William Benzon, Connie Tomaino, Director and Vice President for Music Therapy Services, Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, Beth Abraham Health Services, Bronx, New York
Jersey City, New Jersey.What do we actually know about the health benefits of music & or how music is processed by our brains? HEAR Connie Tomaino, William Benzon, Ph.D.,Dr. Oliver Sacks ~ Language & singing. RAM FILE LISTEN :

William Condon

William Condon says: "Your body's locked precisely with your speech. You can't break out of this no matter what you do. Your eyes even blink in synchrony with your speech." Movements appear to begin, change, or end on the same film frame that a new vowel or consonant begins - within about four-hundreths of a second in the new sound. "The synchrony of the listener with the speaker is just as good as my own synchrony with myself." An auditory-motor reflex in the central nervous system might allow, even force, a listener's movements to synchronize with a speaker's voice far faster than any conscious reaction time . "We're almost in auditory touch. When I speak to you, my thoughts are translated into muscle movements an and then into airways that hit your ear, and your eardrum starts to oscillate in absolute synchrony with my voice. In essence there's no vacuum between us - it takes only a few milliseconds for a sound to register in the brain stem, 14 milliseconds for it to reach the left hemisphere."
FIND MORE RESEARCH FROM WILLIAM CONDOM See subliminal musical harmony - Listen to the Boston Univerity radio show recorded in 1970...

Edward T. Hall

Edward T. Hall Hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm. One little girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Hall and his student realized that without knowing it, she was "the director" and "the orchestrator."

A researcher filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour each seemed to be "doing his own thing." When they played it and rolled the film, the two fit perfectly-- for all of the film's four and a half minutes. But there was no music playing in that playground, says the author, "Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves." music and rhythm are part of what draw us into the larger body of the superorganism. 31b
Careful study showed that the group was moving in synchrony to a silent rhythm . Edward T. Hall of Beyond Culture hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm. One Little Girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Hall and his student realized that without knowing it, she was "the director" and "the orchestrator."
Eventually, the researchers found a tune that fit the silent cadence. When they played it and rolled the film, it looked exactly as if each kid were dancing to the melody. But there had been no music playing in the schoolyard. Said Hall, "Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves." William Condon was led to conclude that it doesn't make sense to view humans as "isolated entities." And Edward Hall took this inference a step further: "an unconscious undercurrent of synchronized movement tied the group together" into what he called a "shared organizational form."

FREDERICK ERICKSON

Frederick Erickson Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles has written (with Jeffrey Schultz) The Counselor as Gatekeeper: Social Interaction in Interviews and numerous papers on the conduct of face-to-face interaction, with particular emphasis on the role of rhythm in the regulations of interaction and on the influence of listeners' activity on the discourse production of speakers. He has been an innovator in the use of film and video to study situations of oral discourse. During 1998-99, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. a socio-linguistic micro-analyst at Interaction Lab, Grad School of Ed, U of Pennsylvania, studies Rhythmic synchrony. (Psych Today, 11/87, pp. 37-8) 36b
So . . . who should you celebrate? That fabulous fourth-grade teacher your kid has -- the one who sees each of her 23 charges as unique-quirky souls who are in totally different places on their developmental paths toward becoming their cool-peculiar selves. The fourth-grade teacher whom you should avoid at all costs? The one who's got everything under control, with all of the kids sitting at their desks, completely unable to express themselves.
You want leadership? Go find a fabulous fourth-grade teacher, and watch how she "plays" the classroom.

Sociolinguist Microanalyst Frederick Erickson
Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Frederick Erickson has written (with Jeffrey Schultz) The Counselor as Gatekeeper : Social Interaction in Interviews and numerous papers on the conduct of face-to-face interaction, with particular emphasis on the role of rhythm in the regulations of interaction and on the influence of listeners' activity on the discourse production of speakers. He has been an innovator in the use of film and video to study situations of oral discourse. During 1998-99, he is a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.

The Music Goes Round and Round: How Music Means in School
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/Educational-Theory/Contents/45_1_Erickson.html
In this essay, I will show how classroom conversation is musical — we sing when we speak — and how this musicality is fundamental for our sense of discourse coherence. Research that shows how talk hangs together so as to make sense may be crucial for implementing what new standards call for as "teaching for understanding." A researcher's musical sense may be essential for identifying and analyzing the fundamental organization of classroom talk within which teachers and students construct understanding together. As a former musician and musicologist, I think we need to think carefully about how music fits into Eisner's overall vision of relations among the arts, educational research, and educational practice.

speech and music, speech development, language development, talk

The Tomatis Method
A Biography of Dr. Tomatis and the overview Good learners are good listeners. In the attached pages, we will explore why. You will see why many learning disabilities are in fact listening disabilities. The good news is that we can tune up your ears, so that you can attain your full learning potential.

Dr. Sandra Trehub
Development of auditory pattern perception, development of auditory sensitivity, singing to infants, deafness. Lullaby-like songs are Universal Sandra Trehub is one of the authors of a noted study on musically untutored babies , showing that they prefer harmony to dissonance .
BABIES REMEMBER MUSIC HEARD IN THE WOMB
Many features of music are universal as well as apparently innate, meaning present at birth. All societies have music, all sing lullaby-like songs to their infants, and most produce tonal music, or music composed in subsets of the 12-tone chromatic scale, such as the diatonic or pentatonic scales. Some of the earliest known musical instruments, crane bone flutes from the Jiahu site in China, occupied from 7000 to 5700 B.C., produce a tonal scale.
Dr. Sandra Trehub, of the University of Toronto, has developed methods of testing the musical preferences of infants as young as 2 to 6 months. She finds they prefer consonant sounds, like perfect fifths or perfect fourths, over dissonant ones. A reasonable conclusion is that "the rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather than products of culture," she wrote in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience.
The human auditory system is probably tuned to perceive the most important sounds in a person's surroundings, which are those of the human voice. Three neuroscientists at Duke University, Dr. David A. Schwartz, Dr. Catherine Q. Howe and Dr. Dale Purves, say that on the basis of this cue they may have solved the longstanding mysteries of the structure of the chromatic scale and the reason why some harmonies are more pleasing than others.
Though every human voice, and maybe each utterance, is different, a certain commonality emerges when many different voices are analyzed. The human vocal tract shapes the vibrations of the vocal cords into a set of harmonics that are more intense at some frequencies than others relative to the fundamental note. The principal peaks of intensity occur at the fifth and the octave, with lesser peaks at other intervals that correspond to most of the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Almost identical spectra were produced by speakers of English, Mandarin, Persian and Tamil.
The Duke researchers believe the auditory system judges sounds to be pleasant the closer they approximate to this generalized power spectrum of the human voice. "A musical tone combination whose power is concentrated at the same places as a human speech sound will sound more familiar and more natural," Dr. Schwartz said.

Anita Gerlach The Lullaby Project
Anita Gerlach who, along with her husband, has been collecting lullabies around the country for the last eight years. She has compiled many of them into a CD, but has recorded literally hundreds from a wide variety of cultures. She has also done extensive research on the subject.

DEUTSCH The mysterious no-man's-land between speech and music.
Composers throughout the ages have played with relationships between speech and music, either by composing music that shares some of the qualities of speech or by embedding segments of speech in musical contexts. In this demonstration, a simple phrase -- 'sometimes behaves so strangely'-- is spoken repeatedly. Towards the end of the track, a curious thing happens: the words that are spoken start to sound as if they are being sung.
"We don't really know why the brain hears speech as speech and music as music," said Deutsch . "This demonstration opens the door to uncovering new connections between speech and music."

Music is Language is and Language is Music ~ Karen Ellis

Nick Bannen
How the brain tunes out background noise
'Detector neurons' focus exclusively on novel sounds.
12/05 European Journal of Neuroscience.
The novelty detector neurons seem able to store information about a pattern of sound, so they may also be involved in speech, which requires anticipating the end of a word and knowing where the next one begins."Speech fluency requires a predictive strategy," Covey explained. "Whatever we have just heard allows us to anticipate what will come next, and violations of our predictions are often surprising or humorous."
Special neurons in the brain stem of rats focus exclusively on novel sounds and help them ignore predictable and ongoing noises, a new study finds. The same process likely occurs in humans and may affect our speech, and even help us laugh. The " novelty detector neurons ," quickly stop firing if a sound or a pattern of sounds is repeated. They will briefly resume firing if some aspect of the sound changes. The neurons can detect changes in pitch, loudness or duration of a single sound and can also note shifts in the pattern of a complex series of sounds. Study team member Ellen Covey, a psychology professor at the
University of Washington said similar neurons seem to be present in all vertebrates and almost certainly exist in the human brain. The novelty detector neurons seem to act as gatekeepers, Covey and her colleagues conclude, preventing information about unimportant sounds from reaching the brain's cortex, where higher processing occurs. This allows people to ignore sounds that don't require attention.

Resonance ©1996, John Beaulieu
Resonance comes from the Latin verb resonare, meaning to "return to sound". It means to sound and resound, as in an echo. Usually we think of resonance in terms of objects such as bells which when struck continue to ring or resonate the original sound. Another type of resonance is called sympathetic resonance. When we strike a tuning fork another tuning fork of the same pitch will begin to vibrate with the first fork. Resonance can be understood as a merging created when energy moves back and forth between two or more bodies.

The Memetic Origin of Language: modern humans as musical primates
Interdisciplinary connections between Language, Music, Evolution, Reading
How music strikes a chord with language.
A region of the brain, known as the Broca's area, deals with the complex laws of language also helps decide if a tune or series of chords sounds right. Conventional music is governed by a series of laws not unlike those that govern the structure of sentences. Also see

Native languages influence the way people group non-language sounds into rhythms. Exposure to certain patterns of speech can influence one's perceptions of musical rhythms.

About a musical illusion called the " Endlessly Rising Tone " in which a series of tones are presented, each one seeming to be slightly higher in pitch than the last. The tones, however, never go higher now matter how long you listen. Its called " Shepard Tone ", named after the discoverer, R. Shepard. It is known as the Risset scale or the Risset continuous scale. " S hepard, R., Circularity in Judgments of Relative Pitch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 36, 1964, 2346-2353." by R. Shepard from Bell Labs

Scientists are discovering that animals such as birds, whales and apes create, perform and listen to music.
[ Linguistics ]

Their research casts new light on the origin of human language and culture, and helps explain why music has such a powerful emotional effect on people. They have found that musical rhythms and tones are processed in the older, deeper regions of the brain -- the parts humans share with our animal ancestors -- not in the outer layers where higher functions like speech and thought reside.
Michael Noad, a whale expert at the University of Sydney in Australia, recently discovered a remarkable demonstration of musical learning in animals. Two years after a few humpback whales moved from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, the resident Pacific whales abandoned their own song in favor of the newcomers' melody, Noad reported in the journal Nature. Like people, animals learn music from one another. Birds copy each other's songs. All the humpback whales in a single breeding area hum the same tune. Human composers have also copied from birds. According to Renato Baserga, a researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Mozart immortalized the song of his pet goldfinch in his Piano Concerto in G.

Encourage Your Child to Speak - use rhyming and word games, memory games, and activities that draw a child into conversation to stimulate language.

Evolution of Language and Music - See Perfect Pitch